User:Overtx/Daniel C. Levy

David C. Levy (born April 10, 1938) is an educator, museum director, art historian designer/photographer and musician. President of the education division of Cambridge Information Group, he was President and Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington DC from 1991 to 2005, and Chancellor of The New School for Social Research in New York City from 1989 to 1991. From 1970-1989 he was Executive Dean and CEO of Parsons School of Design. Levy holds a BA from Columbia University and an MA and PhD from New York University.

Early Life
Born in Brooklyn Heights, NY to artist parents Edgar Levy and Lucille Corcos, Levy moved at age three with his family to an 18th century farmhouse on South Mountain Road in Rockland County, NY. “The Road” had been settled by a group of well-known artists, writers, musicians and actors including John Houseman, Milton Caniff, Maxwell Anderson, Kurt Weil, Lotte Lenya, Hugo Robus, Morris Kantor and Henry Varnum Poor. Thus, at an early age Levy was immersed in a creative community that also included his parents’ New York friends, his godparents, the sculptors David Smith and his wife, Dorothy Dehner as well as the painters John Graham and Richard Lindner, Archile Gorky, Vaclav Vitlacil, Marcus Rothkowitz and I. Rice Pereira, designers William Golden, Cipe Pineles and Will Burtin  and architect/historian James Marsden Fitch.

Education
Levy’s lower school education began in a one-room-schoolhouse where the children, regardless of nominal grade levels, were taught together in one space. Drawn to music in high school, he had planned on a conservatory education but influenced by family friend and neighbor, the philosopher Charles Frankel, he attended Columbia University’s Columbia College where he majored in philosophy with an emphasis on aesthetics and art history. After Columbia Levy attended New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and the university’s SENAP division, from which he received an MA and PhD degree in organizational theory. His doctoral dissertation was an analysis of the failure of Parsons School of Design in the 1960s and of the strategies and history that underlay its merger with the New School for Social Research.

Parsons School of Design
In 1962 Levy was appointed Director of Admissions at Parsons School of Design, becoming the school’s vice president in 1968. Following the resignation of Parsons’ president in 1969 and the imminent prospect of Parsons’ insolvency, Parsons’ trustees instructed Levy to close the school. Instead, he negotiated a merger with The New School for Social Research. Under Levy’s stewardship over the following two decades Parsons grew from a small, struggling, non-degree-granting trade school into one of the largest and most diversified college of the visual arts in the U.S., offering multiple undergraduate and graduate degrees in a diverse range of visual arts disciplines. During his19-year tenure as its CEO, Parsons became an international college of the arts, with campuses in Los Angeles, France, the Dominican Republic and Japan. Its enrollment grew from 480 in 1970 to 12,000 by the early 1980s.

Levy developed and often wrote the curricula for more than 30 new bachelor’s and master’s degrees as well as for continuing education offerings in every visual arts discipline. He taught Art History at Parsons and SUNY and created special programs for arts education and research in Italy, West Africa, England, Israel, Japan, the USSR, the United Kingdom and Greece. Parson’s enrollment grew from 480 in 1970 to 12,000 by the early 1980s and it became the principal financial support for its parent university, The New School.

The Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design
In 1979 Levy negotiated Parsons’ annexation of The Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County, renaming it The Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design and creating a bicoastal college of the arts. This was the first (and may be the only) time in American higher education in which a private educational entity absorbed a public institution. The Otis/Parsons partnership spanned a very successful 12 years; ending when Otis become an independent privately supported college, shortly after Levy’s 1991 departure from Parsons and the New School to head Washington’s Corcoran Museum and College of Art.

The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music and Mannes College of Music
In 1987, Levy established The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music. He wrote the school’s initial curriculum and, with the help of his musical collaborator, saxophonist Arnie Lawrence, recruited a faculty of the world’s leading jazz artists including Sir Roland Hannah, Tommy Flannigan, Chico Hamilton, Jimmy Heath, Donald Byrd Reggie Workman and Red Mitchell. Offering New York’s first undergraduate degree in jazz, the school has since grown to become internationally recognized as one of the most influential conservatories in its discipline.

In 1989, during his tenure as The New School’s Chancellor, Levy and his colleagues merged the Mannes College of Music into the university’s community of schools.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art
In January 1991 Levy became the President and Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design in Washington DC, the third oldest museum in the U.S. and Washington’s oldest art institution.

Levy took the Corcoran’s helm amidst the aftershocks of a national firestorm, created in 1989 when the museum cancelled a politically controversial exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. One of the sparks that ignited the “culture wars” of the early 1990s, the Mapplethorpe incident had decimated the Corcoran’s constituency of supporters, wrecked its attendance and seriously threatened its future financial viability.

Over his fourteen-year tenure Levy rebuilt both the museum and its college of art, mounting more than 300 exhibition and expanding the museum’s 1990 attendance of 80,000 to just under one million by 2004. He increased the Corcoran’s assets from $8 to $22 million, led a capital campaign that raised $110 million, increased its membership by 600 percent and doubled the college’s undergraduate enrollment. He created the school’s first Master’s level graduate programs, acquiring and restoring an historic 19th century Georgetown schoolhouse to house them.

The Delaware College of Art and Design (DCAD)
In 1995-6, responding to a request by a public/private partnership in Wilmington, Delaware to create a college of art in the city’s downtown center, Levy and Corcoran Dean Sammy Hoi developed a strategic plan, helped raise local funds and formed a partnership between the Corcoran and New York’s Pratt Institute, to co-found and manage a two-year school of art. DCAD also provided an articulated transfer path for students wishing to continue their studies and complete a four-year degree in either Washington or New York. The school thrives today and the Corcoran/Pratt partnership continues to exemplify innovation in higher education and the arts.

The Proposed Frank Gehry Wing of the Corcoran
In the first years of the 21st century, architect Frank Gehry was retained to create a new and final wing for the Corcoran museum and college. The resultant design was received with acclaim and $110 million was raised towards its $160 million cost. Following the collapse of the internet bubble in 2001-2 and the untimely death of its chairman in 2004, the Corcoran board underwent a significant change of leadership and abandoned the Gehry project. As a result, Levy resigned as President/Director, subsequently accepting his current post as President of the Education Division of Cambridge Information Group.

Cambridge Information Group (CIG)
In 2005 Levy began a consulting relationship with Cambridge Information Group (CIG), becoming President of its Education Group and president of its graduate school, the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, in 2007. At that time, the Institute had campuses in London and New York City. In 2012 Levy established a partnership with Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles County, creating a third major center for the Institute. Sotheby’s Institute enrolls approximately 450 full-time students, primarily in programs leading to the MA and PhD degrees.

In 2007 Levy, with his wife Carole Feld and partner Jeff Levin, founded Bach to Rock (B2R), a chain of music schools with an innovative curriculum based on the formation of small bands and targeted primarily to young people in grades K – 12. Under the management of CIG’s Education Group, B2R currently operates six schools in the DC region and is franchising nationally, beginning with new centers in the New York and Philadelphia suburbs.

Community Service and Awards
Levy was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France and named Washingtonian of the Year by the Washingtonian Magazine. As a graphic designer, Levy art directed some 60 publications annually at Parsons School of Design, many of which won design awards and commendations from such organizations as the New York Art Directors Club and the American Institute of Graphic Design. He holds honorary degrees from The New School and Cedar Crest College. He has served as a Commissioner of Arts and Humanities for the District of Columbia, as an advisor to the Smithsonian Institution and as a trustee of the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and the National Hospice Foundation. He currently serves on the boards of the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers (The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards) and The Larry Rivers Foundation. He is a member of The Century Association (NY) and The Cosmos Club (Washington DC).

Personal Life
Since his late teens, Levy has had a second career as a jazz musician and has played and toured in the US, Europe and Asia with some of the leading jazz artists of the 20th century. These have included Jimmy Heath, Chico Hamilton, Junior Mance, Arnie Lawrence, and Donald Byrd. He has also performed with singer Joni Mitchell and with actor/musician George Segal. With his close friend and associate, the artist Larry Rivers, he created The East Thirteenth Street Band, which recorded for both Rizolli and Atlantic Records, performing throughout and US in the 1980s and early 19910s. From the 1960s onwards Levy has freelanced as a photographer and has created a body of work on the American industrial landscape which has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the US and abroad.

In 1959 Levy married graphic designer and design historian, Janet Meyer. They have two children, Thomas William and Jessica Anne Levy. Separated in 1982, Levy married PBS Senior VP, Carole L. Feld in 1992. Their son, Alexander Wolf Levy, was born in 1995.

Levy and his family live on Embassy Row in Washington DC.